Essex County herald. [volume] (Guildhall, Vt.) 1873-1964, 1887-12-23

anxious tnat during their whole life they
| should face in the right direction 30 that they
shall come up in the resurrection Of the Just
| whichever way they are buried How many
there are chiefly anxious that a minister Of
the Gospel shall come In the line Of apostolic
succession, not caring so much whether he
comes from Apostle Paul or Apostle Judas.
Ihey have a way OF measuring gnat until
It IS larger than camel
Again: My subject photographs all those
who are abhorrent Of small sins, while they
are reckless in regard to magnificent thefts.
You will lind many a merchant who, while
he is so careful that he would not take a yard
of cloth or a spool of cotton from the counter
without paying for it, and who, IL bank
cashier Should make a mistake and send in a
roll OF bills s. too much, would dispatch a
messenger in hot haste to return the surplus,
yet who will go into a stock company In
which, after while, be gets control Of the
stock, and then waters the stock and makes
Sl0J,0J0 appear like 500, 900. He only
stole $4,000 by the operation. Many OF
the men OF fortune made their wealth in that
way. One OF those men, engaged In such un-
righteous acts, that evening, the evening Of
the very day when he waterei the stock. viii
find wharf rat stealing q newspaper from
the basement doorway, and will go out and
catch the urchin by the collar, and twist the
collar so tightly the poor fellow cannot say
that it was thirst for knowledge that led him
to the dishonest act, but grip the collar
tighter and tighter, saying: ~ have been
looking for you long while; you've stole my
paper four or five times, haven't you2-
you miserable wretch" And then the old
stock gambler, with voice they can hear
three blocks, will cry out: police, poicem
That sans man, the evening OF the day in
which he watered his stock, will kneel
God for the prosperity of the day,
then kiss his children good night with
an air which seems to say: 81 hope you
will all grow up to be as goo1 as your
father" Prisons for sins insectile in size,
but palaces for crimes dromedarian. No
mercy for sins animalcule In proportion, but
great leniency for masto1on iniquity. A
poor boy slyly takes from the basket OF
market woman a choice pear-saving some
one else from the cholera-and you smother
him in the horrible atmosphere of Raymond
Street Jail or New York Tombs while his
cousin. who has been skillful enough to steal
S50,0)0 from the city, you will make him a
There is a great deal of uneasiness and ner-
vousness now among some people in our
time to have gotten unrighteous fortunes,
a great deal of nervousness about dynamite.
l tell them that God will put under their mn
righteous fortunes something more explosive
than dynamite the earthquake Of his omnip-
otent indignation. 1t is time that we learn
III AIlleTlCa JudG Sln Is HOL eACuSdDlo III pIO-
portion as it declares large dividends and has
outriders in equipage. Many man is riding
to perd ton, position ahead and lackey be-
hind. To steal one copy of newspaper is a
gnat; to steal many thousands o. dollars is
camel. There is many fruitdealer who would
not consent to steal basket OF peaches from
neighbor's STALL but who would not scruple
to depress the fruit market; and as long as
can remember we have read every summer
the peach crop Of Maryland is failure, and
by the time the crop comes in the misappre-
hension makes difference of millions of dol
lars. A. man who would not steal one peach
basket steals 80, 900 peach baskets Go down
in the summer time into the Mercantile
library, in the reading room, and see the
newspaper reports of the crops from all parts
of the country, and their phraseology is very
I much the same, and the same men wrote
them, methodically and UNANIMOUSLY carry
ing out the huge lying about the grain crop
from year to year and for a score of years.
After a while there will be a corner in
the wheat market, and men who had a
contempt for a petty theft will bur-
glariZe the wheat bin Of a nation and
commit larceny upon the American corn
crib. And some of the men will sit i'll
churches and in reformatory institutions try
ing to strain out the small gnats Of scoundrel-
ism, while in their grain elevators and their
storehouses they are fattening huge camels
which they expect after while to swallow.
Society has to be entirely reconstructed on
this subject. We are to find that sin is in
excusable in proportion as it is great.
Iknow in our time the tendency is to charge
religious frauds upon good men. They say:
"Oh, what class OF frauds you have in the
Church OF God in this day." and when an
elder of church, or a deacon, or minister Of
the Gospel, or superintendent of Sabbath
school turns out defaulter, what display
heads there are in many of the newspapers
nriD tvn EiyoI linz nil M
Saint Absconded;n Clerical Scoundre-
ism;' Religion at a Discounts" Shame
on the Churches;" while there are a
thousand scoundrels outside to where
| there is one inside the church, and
the misbehavior of those who never see
the inside of church is so great it is enough
to tempt q man to become Christian to get
cut of their company. But in all circles,
religious and irrelgious, the tendency is to
excuse sin in proportion as 1t is mammoth.
Even John Milton in his Paradise Lost"
while he condemns Satan, gives such grand
description OF him you have hard work to
| suppress your admiration. Oh, this strain
ing out Of small sins like gnats and this gulp.
ing down great iniquties like camels!
This subject does not give the picture OF
one or two persons but is gallery in which
| thousands of people may see their likenesses.
| For instance all those people who, while they
would not rob their neighbor Of farthing,
| the public. man has house to sell, and
| he tells his customer 1t is worth $50, COO
| Next day the assessor comes around and
| the owner says 1t is worth $4,000 The
| government of the United States took
Off the tax from personal income among
other reasons, because SO few people
would tell the truth and many a man with
an income of hundreds of dollars day made
statements which seemed to imply he was
about to be handed over to the overseer Of
the poor. Careful to pay their passage from
| Liverpool to New York, yet smuggling in
| their Saratoga trunk ten silk dresses from
| Paris and a half dozen watches from Geneva,
| Switzerland, telling the custom house officers
on the wharf "There is nothing in that
trunk but wearing apparel" and putting
fve-doliar gold piece in his hand to punctuate
| the statement
| Described in the text are all those who are
particular never to break the law of gram
mar, and who want all their language an ele-
| CANT specimen of syntax, straining out all
the inaccuracies of speech with a fine sieve of
literary criticism, while through their con-
versation 60 SANDER and innuendo and pro-
| family and falsehood larger than whole car
avan of cames, when they might better
fracture every law of the language
and shock intellectual taste, and better let
every verb seek in vain for its nominatve
and every noun for its government and
every proposition lose its way in the sentence,
and adjectives and partciples and pronouns
get into grand riot worthy of the Fourth
Ward on election day, than to commit a
moral inaccuracy. Better swallow q thou.
sand gnats than one camel.
Such persons are also described in the text
who are very much alarmed about the small
faults of Others, and have no alarm about
their own great transgressions. There are in
| every community and every church watch